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Looking for Harlem

Name: Looking for Harlem
Author: Maria Balshaw
ISBN: 9780745313344

by Maria Balshaw

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Overview

Taking the incredible flowering of African-American literature in the 1920s as its starting point, this book offers a cogent and persuasive new reading of a diverse range of twentieth-century black American writing. From the streets, subways, hotels, and cabarets of New York's Harlem and Chicago's Southside, Maria Balshaw moves beyond the canon to encompass often neglected writing by Rudolph Fisher, Wallace Thurman, and Claude McKay, as well as the more familiar work of Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Nella Larsen, and Toni Morrison.

In a provocative revision of African-American literary history, Balshaw examines the creation of an "urban aesthetic" and explores the links between the engagement with the city and fictional reconstruction of racial identity and race writing. Focusing on the material culture of the city, the visual sense of the urban environment, the class dynamics of urban culture and the crucial importance of consumerism, this study presents a critically astute, challenging and very welcome new approach to a much-studied area of contemporary American fiction.
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About the Author, Maria Balshaw

Maria Balshaw is a research fellow, specialising in issues of race and gender in urban literature and theory at the University of Birmingham. She is the co-editor, with Liam Kennedy, of Urban Representations, also available from Pluto Press.